Consumer transactions with merchants are increasingly being made payable with other than cash or checks. More recently, the device being used by consumers to conduct such consumer transactions is a mobile consumer electronics device having wireless communications functionality, such as a cellular telephone or a Personal Digital Assistant (PDA). Such mobile consumer electronics devices lack interoperability.
One application protocol used by mobile consumer electronics devices having wireless communications functionality is I the Wireless Application Protocol (WAP). WAP, however, has its limitations. WAP requires key improvements in security, and also requires constant air time for offline operations. WAP places limitations on a rich user interface, and lacks compatibility between micro-browsers. WAP required different gateways from different vendors
Another such protocol is I-mode protocol, which is a wireless data service that is accessed by a wireless packet network and the contents are described in a subset of the HTML language. One problem with the I-mode protocol is that there is no client side scripting language like the Wireless Markup Language (WML), where WML is a language that allows the text portions of Web pages to be presented on cellular telephones and personal digital assistants (PDAs) via wireless access. Also, the I-Mode protocol is not available in all geographic regions.
Consequently, there is a need in the art to provide a mobile consumer electronics device having wireless communications functionality by which a consumer can conduct a cashless transaction on an account issued to the consumer by an issuer, where the transaction is conducted by the consumer with a merchant, and where executable instructions enabling the transaction on the mobile device will interoperate on a variety of different mobile devices (e.g.; cellular telephones, PDAs, palmtop computers, etc.) as one application offering different types of financial transactions and multiple related services.